How to Sleep Like a Baby, Wake Up Refreshed, and Get More Out of Life

by Dianne Hales

Overview

EVERY DAY STARTS WITH A GOOD NIGHT’S SLEEP

Did you just suppress a yawn?

Are you one of the walking weary—the 100 million Americans who suffer from occasional or chronic sleep problems? If so, you know how serious the problem can be: troubled sleepers can lead troubled lives. On an average, we spend one third of our lives sleeping—and how we sleep can make the difference between feeling tired all of the time and facing each day with a fresh, energetic attitude.
 
This practical guide to healthy sleep by sleep expert Dianne Hales can help you get the rest you need to get the most out of life. It covers the latest discoveries of “sleep scientists”—whose probing of the mysteries of sleep has led to breakthroughs in treating sleep problems—and includes:

• 101 mental maneuvers for putting yourself to sleep
• New treatments for age-old complaints like snoring and sleepwalking
• Effective methods for overcoming sleep rhythm disorders caused by jet lag or shift changes
• New insights into how dreams can help you solve daytime problems
• Simple self-tests to determine if you need professional help—and where to turn if you do

Your sleep problem is not insurmountable. You, too, can sleep like a baby and wake up ready for a healthy, active life.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780307775405
Publisher:	Random House Publishing Group
Publication date:	03/30/2011
Sold by:	Random House
Format:	eBook
Pages:	216
File size:	1 MB

About the Author

Dianne Hales has served as a contributing editor for Parade, Ladies Home Journal, Working Mother, and American Health and has written for many national publications, including Family Circle, Good Housekeeping, The New York Times, Reader's Digest, The Washington Post, Woman's Day, and World Book. In addition to more than a dozen trade books, she is the author of 24 editions of the leading college health textbook, An Invitation to Health.

Read an Excerpt

CHAPTER 1
 
A Bedtime Story:
What Goes On When the Lights Go Out
 
It’s time for bed. Your eyelids droop. Your limbs grow heavy. Stretching and sighing, you climb between the sheets and turn out the light. But you can’t turn off your racing mind or restless body. You toss. You turn. You yawn. You yearn. In the blackness of the night, you worry: You aren’t going to be able to sleep—not now when you’re drowsy, not later when you’re desperate, maybe not ever again.
 
You’re hardly alone in your midnight misery. Researchers estimate that 100 million Americans have occasional or chronic problems sleeping. As one wit observed, “If sleep knits up the raveled sleeve of care, a sizable segment of the population is coming a bit unwound.” Sleep disorders may plague more men and women than the all-too-common cold.
 
But while you have to suffer through a cold, you don’t have to resign yourself to nights without rest and days without zest. You can sleep better by night and feel better by day. Without pills. Without expensive and extensive tests. Without treatments that make you more miserable than insomnia ever did. In fact, you can do more to improve your sleep than anyone or anything else. This book will show you how. But before you begin sleeping better, you have to understand more about sleep itself.
 
NIGHT LIFE
 
Although you may not realize it, you live two lives—one in the waking world and one behind closed lids. In all, you spend a third of your life asleep, or more than 220,000 hours over the course of seventy years. You may think that during this time your sleeping body is like a car parked for the night: motionless, engine off, headlights dimmed. It is anything but.
 
During sleep, muscles tense and relax. Pulse, temperature, and blood pressure rise and fall. Chemicals crucial for well-being course through the bloodstream. The brain, like a Hollywood producer, conjures up fantastic stories, complete with cliffhanger plots and dazzling special effects. In fact, so much happens during sleep that it’s astounding that we manage to sleep at all.
 
To understand the process of sleep, imagine yourself descending a staircase. As you close your eyes and drift off, you take a small step down into the first stage of what is called quiet sleep. Stage 1 is a sort of twilight zone between waking and sleep. If roused, you’d probably jerk awake quickly and deny that you’d slept at all. If you were hooked up to an EEG (electroencephalogram), your brain would produce irregular, rapid electrical waves. Your muscle tension decreases. You breathe smoothly, and mundane thoughts float through your mind.
 
The next step takes you down into stage 2 of quiet sleep.
1. EEG (brain wave record) Awake.
 
2. EEG Stage 2 Sleep. Brain waves are characterized by sudden bursts of activity.
 
3. EEG Stage 4 Sleep. In this most profound state of unconsciousness, very large brain waves appear in a slow, jagged pattern.
 
4. EEG REM or “Active” Sleep. Brain waves are pinched and irregular, resembling the patterns of waking more than deep sleep.
 
Your brain waves become larger, punctuated by occasional sudden bursts of electrical activity. You’ve definitely crossed the border between wakefulness and sleep. If someone lifted your eyelids gently, you wouldn’t waken; your eyes no longer respond to stimuli.
 
As you descend into stage 3, your brain waves become slower and bigger. In this state of deep slumber, your bodily functions slow down even more. Finally, stepping down into stage 4, you reach deepest sleep, the most profound state of unconsciousness. On an EEG, your brain waves would appear extremely large and slow. You are so “dead to the world” that even a thunderstorm might not waken you.
 
This step-by-step journey into oblivion usually takes more than an hour. Then you begin to climb upward, moving rapidly through the same sleep stages as before, not all the way to full wakefulness but into active sleep. Because the pupils dart back and forth, this stage is called Rapid Eye Movement or REM sleep. (The four stages of quiet sleep are often referred to as non-REM or NREM sleep.)
 
During REM, your brain waves resemble those of waking rather than of quiet sleep. The large muscles of your torso, arms, and legs are paralyzed, although your fingers and toes may twitch. You breathe quickly and shallowly; the flow of blood through your brain accelerates. REM sleep is the time of vivid dreaming, and if wakened, you’d probably recall a tantalizing fragment of a fantasy.
 
After about ten minutes in REM sleep, you descend the sleep staircase again. The entire cycle of REM and NREM stages takes roughly ninety minutes. Early in the night, the periods spent in the deepest stages of quiet sleep are longer. In the second half of the night, REM sleep predominates. By morning, you go around the sleep circuit four or five times.
 
THE NIGHTS OF YOUR LIFE
 
Throughout a lifetime, no physiological process changes more than sleep needs and patterns. A newborn may spend up to eighteen hours asleep. By age ten, a child requires only nine or ten hours. The best sleepers of all are preteens. They fall asleep within five or ten minutes, sleep for nine and a half hours, and spend 95 percent of their time in bed in solid, continuous, deep sleep—the best rest of a lifetime. By adulthood, seven or eight hours usually provide adequate rest; in old age, six may suffice.
 
More than total sleep time changes with age, however. The passing years affect the quality as well as the quantity of our sleep. From infancy to adulthood, as total sleep time decreases by more than half, REM periods dwindle to less than a quarter of a night’s sleep. By their thirties, men sleep somewhat less deeply; women begin getting less deep sleep in their fifties. By age sixty-five, the proportion of time both sexes spend in deep sleep is half that at age twenty-five. Both stages 1 and 2—the lighter sleep stages—increase. REM shrinks to about a fifth of total sleep time.
 
In old age, sleep often becomes more fragmented, and the number of nighttime arousals has more of an impact on daytime alertness than the actual hours of sleep—even if the wakenings are so brief they aren’t remembered. In a seven-hour sleep period, a healthy senior citizen averages 153 arousals. By comparison, a twenty-five-year-old wakens only ten times.
 
WHY SLEEP?
 
Whatever your age or sleep stage, you ultimately sleep for the same reason: You must. Although some individuals have gone days without rest, sooner or later they succumbed to sleepiness. No other force may be as irresistible. Yet after centuries of living with what some have called the gentle tyrant of sleep, no one can explain why we spend so much time at rest. In fact, sleep, the basis of myths and mysteries, remains a biological riddle.
 
Unable to understand sleep, different societies came up with their own theories for this curious state. The people of Fiji thought the soul went wandering as the body rested, so they never wakened sleepers abruptly for fear that the soul might not have time to return. Some ancient cultures, thinking of sleep as an intermediate state between waking and death, feared it as a time when a person might slip from night into eternity. Others considered sleep a realm of deities and built temples in which to worship the lords of the night.
 
Some anthropologists have suggested that nature induced sleep to keep early man out of harm’s way. The human race might never have survived the perils of darkness if sleep hadn’t kept the first families safe in their caves rather than roaming through the night. But in our neon-lit, nonstop world, we no longer need to sleep for safety’s sake. Does that mean that sleep has become an anachronism?
 
Sleep researcher Allan Rechtschaffen of the University of Chicago thinks not: “If sleep doesn’t serve an absolutely vital function, then it’s the biggest mistake the evolutionary process ever made. How could sleep have remained virtually unchanged as a monstrously useless, maladaptive vestige throughout the whole of mammalian evolution while selection has, during the same period of time, been able to achieve all kinds of finely tuned adjustments in the shape of fingers and toes?”
 
Yet no one knows exactly what makes sleep so important. Aristotle associated it with a cooling of the vapors of the head. Shakespeare described it as the “balm of hurt minds, great nature’s second course; chief nourisher in life’s feast.” Freud saw it as a symbolic journey back to the security of the womb. Pavlov thought of it as a conditioned response.
 
Modern scientists have contended that sleep repairs the ravages of the day, purges our brains of extraneous information, conserves energy, allows time for body maintenance. Perhaps none of these theories is correct; perhaps they all are. Sleep, like waking, may fulfill not just one primary need but many.